Getting permits for big new projects is hard - Green energy should not be an exception

Electrical transmission lines in Virginia, USA, 03 January 2024. Building this kind of infrastructure can be held up by permitting - but that's only right and proper CREDIT: Shawn Thew/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

A recent Reuters article quotes Miguel Stilwell d’Andrade, CEO of big Portuguese utility company EDP, complaining that overly-complex, burdensome permitting processes among European nations often cause new energy projects to stall and be cancelled before they can be completed.

“In the US, if you produce 1 kilo of green hydrogen, you get 3 dollars,” d’Andrade said. “In Europe, I need to submit a room full of paper.” 

While I have heard similar complaints from CEOs of other European energy companies, all of whom point to the comparative simplicity of US permitting processes, that doesn’t mean obtaining permits in America could exactly be referred to as swift or efficient.

One transmission project I wrote about last summer, the Transwest Express project designed to carry wind-generated electricity from Wyoming to Oregon, suffered through 15 years of efforts to obtain the needed state, local, and federal permits before finally getting the go-ahead to proceed to construction last year. With permits now in hand, the process of constructing the line is likely to take another 5 years or more to complete.